Envisioning the Light Beyond the Storms

Some reflections on "The Light Pirate" by Lily Brooks-Dalton

When Lily Brooks-Dalton’s book The Light Pirate begins, we are set amidst the anticipation of an oncoming hurricane in coastal Florida, the third major hurricane of the season. Hurricane Wanda defies all records and in the first quarter of the book you experience the violence, the fear, and the chaos from such a storm. This storm comes in what I deduce is the near future. Not quite this moment in time, but far enough in the future that almost every hurricane wreaks havoc somewhere in the same way Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico.

Yet like we see today, people everywhere remain in denial that these storms are any different than they were before. Kirby, an electrical lineman, reassures his pregnant wife–who is still recovering from the trauma of being in another devastating hurricane the year before–that he’s got it, that he can protect his family. 

Of course, as one can guess from the growing tension, Kirby cannot protect his family from such a storm, especially in the world of climate change. And we experience that fear and tension. 

I couldn’t put the book down in that first fourth of the book, yet also wondered if I could take anymore. Will this be a continuous onslaught of climate horrors? I wondered. I didn’t know if I could take that. My friend, Kim, had recommended the book to me, and I trusted her judgment. 

What I found from the remaining three-quarters of the book was a different story entirely. Hurricane Wanda was the catalyst, the moment that marked the change. But the rest was a steady move towards a community and a people having to make decisions about how to be in this moment of climate crisis. This story revolves around a young girl named Wanda–Frida and Kirby’s daughter–born in and named for the storm that began that steady movement towards change.

In the second part, we find Wanda a 10-year-old girl truly in and of the place she lives, Rudder, Florida. She becomes even more a part of that place when she befriends a neighbor, Phyllis, whom her father has asked to watch her now that the daycare center has shut down in the wake of the most recent hurricane. Phyllis is a biology teacher and a prepper and brings Wanda out into the wilds near where they live to investigate the rewilding efforts. 

During this period of Wanda’s life, there are moments of drama, but nothing like that of the hurricane that ripped through in that first part. Rather what we’re seeing through the perspective of Wanda is a slower pace, yet a steady movement towards a changing world. In each chapter, there seems to be another indication that Florida is steadily becoming a part of the natural world again. Floods and creeping tides push more people farther north, there’s talk of Miami being evacuated and being left to the sea, and after each storm fewer people return and the city services begin to decline. And of course people in small towns like Rudder aren’t offered even the slightest nod of assistance from being displaced. It is exactly what we’ll be seeing in the future, and what Jake Bittle predicts in his book, The Great Displacement.

Yet the creep of nature continues and civil society responds by withdrawing north. For most, the decline of the services and civilization felt abrupt and quick. Yet for the reader, there’s an indication that these are coming if you pay attention like Phyllis does. And so, time moves on, the water gets higher, and society and nature in Florida have changed completely from what we know it today. 

This slow-paced way of learning about what life is like at each moment in time throughout Wanda’s life from childhood to old age, you see how a person adapts to a changing planet. And it’s not all drama and doom and violence. There’s some of that, but there’s also beauty and there’s care and there’s a reemerging into being of the place we are in.

Those are the images that stuck with me from The Light Pirate. The slower, smaller moments. The steady adaptations humans make to survive. It’s not a perfect life. It’s a daily challenge to find food and keep living structures safe. It’s a life mostly lived at night because the sun’s heat could bake a person alive. But there’s a stillness and calm in this future that the book depicts.

We often think of the violence of disasters that will mark the future. And those will inevitably be there. But then there's life after the storms when the water doesn’t recede, or the water doesn’t come, depending on where you are. 

I want to think that we can still try to stave off the sea level rise that occurs in The Light Pirate, but I also know that if we don’t envision how and what that will look like in the future, we won’t be ready. As we know, there will be historic sea level rise and we are still seeing disasters on scales we’ve never seen before. So we do need to prepare somehow. We can certainly prepare like Phyllis and like I’m trying to do with this project. But we can also prepare by imagining what a future can be like amidst climate change. And we don’t have to imagine it as a Mad Max wasteland. We don’t have to imagine it as chaotic and unpredictable. Yes, there will be those elements, but can we also think about how a future can be something calmer, more connected to nature and the place we’re in, and less reliant on the systems that have made our modern society.

We’re trying so hard to preserve civilization as we know it–with our vehicles that can carry across the city or the country or the globe in relatively short periods of time, with our technology that allows us to talk to whoever whenever we want–that we can’t envision a future without those things. Maybe whatever the future will look like can be good without those modern amenities. We may not have a choice but to accept their demise.

And I’m not saying I’m ready nor do I want our modern life to end as we know it, but there will likely come a time when we will have no choice but to accept it. So maybe we can prepare ourselves by doing what Lily Brooks-Dalton does in The Light Pirate and envisioning a future that isn’t horrible despite being vastly different from the one we know today.